A letter from our CEO and Co-Founder Joe Olsen on where we’ve been, what to expect next and our recent announcement that Rova is now Birdsnest.

Our world has seen significant, seismic evolution over the past 20 years as software and hardware technologies have accelerated change in the very fabric of our culture, redefining the way we behave as individuals and interact with one another and everything around us.

The biggest change (or group of changes) has been our interaction models – driven by our access to new data. Large, seemingly endless amounts of highly contextualized data.

For most businesses, dashboards were the first wave of tools to take advantage of this change. Getting all that data onto one screen was pretty cool in itself. But data is evidence, not the smoking gun and without context, it’s just noise. The response? The second wave – highly contextualized data aggregation and workflow management platforms that not only let you see data, but also provide the ability to create better data in the first place and then on top of that – activate the data to achieve a specific goal. This is what we accomplished with Rova.

What began as a way to keep track of strategic performance data and share it with clients, however, has evolved into much more – as a comprehensive strategic performance management suite.

In the last 6 months, we’ve added several new features that enable agencies to drive better relationships and more success with their clients. We’ve also grown our partnerships and now integrate with over 800 other tools, which has resulted in more than 80% of all data pushed into Rova being automated – using these integrations. Rova is now the best-in-class strategic performance management solution for agencies – that stands alone.

But we’re just getting started…

The third wave is now here and cloud-computing power, along with the continuous hyper-contextualization of data has supercharged machine learning capabilities creating artificially intelligent software in almost every single part of our lives.

We’re no exception here – and with the launch of our Agency Outlook features coming online in the next couple weeks, we’re layering on the ability to gain insight across the entire organization, to plan and forecast for growth and to find and take action on trends, broadening our machine learning capabilities to identify and suggest growth opportunities for your agency.

This level of business intelligence has never been seen before and is revolutionary for our industry – we’re excited our customers will be the first to use it.

As the tool has evolved, we have too as a company. While Rova encompassed our early aspirations, a new name and identity is necessary to reflect our mission and communicate our objective today – to be the #1 tool for agencies, using big data and machine learning to simplify growth and streamline client success. We know that organic growth is the lifeblood of every agency and we know that happy, fulfilled clients are the key to that success.

We also know that running an agency is difficult because we’ve been there ourselves. Making the right decisions about where to grow, how to grow and when is key to creating a profitable, sustainable organization.

This is why you’re increasingly defining success, tracking against it and utilizing the process of prioritizing results over activity to make better decisions – to ultimately drive your agency’s success. We feel like we’re at the epicenter of that activity and that’s why we’ve decided to embrace our new identity as Birdsnest.

At Birdsnest, we view your businesses as one of our own. We know your business is an investment in your future and we know our investment in you is an investment in ours. We feel like this change is a big leap forward, but most importantly, we hope it reflects our ongoing commitment to your success.